In 2012, The City of Seseña and the Center for Excellence in Spain launched an initiative called Proyecto FAST -- a program to aid start-ups in refining their business ideas to minimize risks by the time their company reached the market. Learn how Proyecto Fast utilized Ideascale to crowsource rich feedback, facilitate global collaboration, and market and test ideas before launching businesses in the open market.

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PROYECTO FAST
GOVERNMENT CASE STUDY
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IDEASCALE

2. In the spring of 2012, The City of Seseña and the Center for Excellence in Spain launched
an initiative called Proyecto FAST in cooperation with numerous other partners. The
Proyecto FAST program had a clear-cut goal: to help entrepreneurs succeed in the
business world. With that in mind, the partnership developed a program that would aid
start-ups in refining their business ideas to minimize risks by the time their company
reached the market.
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After several months of program growth, Proyecto FAST launched a MOOC that engaged
1,500 participants over a 10-week course. An international recruitment campaign
leveraged newsletters, social media, and email to engage 1,500 entrepreneurs as they
sought to launch their business. The first four weeks of the course were dedicated to the
generation and fashioning of business ideas so that members had already created several
ideas to test by the time they had reached week five.
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In week five, participants were invited to the invitation-only IdeaScale community called
Empremedemooc where they were asked to share their business ideas and collaborate on
the ideas of others. The results exceeded all initial program estimates.
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• All 1,500 participants joined and contributed to the Emprendemooc community.
• 43 business ideas were evaluated in that time.
• Global collaboration allowed entrepreneurs to consider worldwide market
opportunities and hazards that they otherwise wouldn’t have considered due
to substantial global market research costs.
• Participants adopted Lean Satrtup methodology in order to market test their ideas in
the IdeaScale environment with rich, valuable feedback.
• Emprendemooc administrators from Proyecto FAST consistently reminded
participants to return to the community and shared IdeaScale statistics on an
ongoing basis as part of the program.
• The participants improved their business plans and signed up for the subsequent
acceleration program, resulting in two new start-ups being added to the
Proyecto FAST project portfolio.
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“The results were astonishing and we learned that crowdsourcing for rich feedback on
business ideas in a platform like IdeaScale is a very helpful step before testing businesses in
the open market,” said Pablo Martin, Proyecto FAST Project Lead, “Many entrepreneurs
benefitted from the business maturation possibilities offered by the IdeaScale
platform. “
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Proyecto FAST continues to offer new courses and opportunities and plans to expand its
use of IdeaScale in future courses.
2IdeaScale Case Studies
Proyecto FAST: Emprendemooc
Crowdsourcing Business Maturation